Historic Roads of Alaska Driving the History of the Last Frontier Front cover: Chevrolet crossing glacier stream on Richardson Highway near Worthington Glacier. The Alaska Railroad Tour Lantern Slide Collection, 1923. ASL-P198-56 ASL-PCA-198 Back cover: Keystone Canyon on the Richardson Highway. Alaska State Library, The Alaska Railroad Tour Lantern Slide Collection, 1923 ASL-P198-62 Published 2017 OF TRAN T SP EN O M R T T A R T A I P O E N D S A E L U C A A S R N K U I C A O T I S D E E R E R P D E A L R A M T R S A M E T U TA F N T O F N A TES O Funded by: Federal Highway Administration and the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities. Prepared by: Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Office of History and Archaeology and Interpretation and Education, Alaska State Parks Historic Roads of Alaska Haines Highway. Alaska State Parks A tour bus operated by the Richardson Highway Transportation Co. Alaska State Library, Skinner Foundation Photo Collection ASL-P44-05-029 Table of Contents Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................ 1 Alaska’s Historic Road Agencies .................. 3 Alaskan Road Construction ........................ 4 2. The Richardson Highway .............................. 7 Roadhouses ....................................... 10 3. Nome Roads .......................................... 13 Nome-Council Road ................................ 14 Kougarok Road .................................... 15 Nome-Teller Road ................................. 17 4. Southeast Region .................................... 21 Alaska Marine Highway System ..................... 25 5. Williamsport-Pile Bay Road .......................... 27 6. The Alaska Highway .................................. 31 Tok .............................................. 34 The Black Engineers of the Alaska Highway ........ 34 7. The Seward Highway .................................. 37 Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel ................... 41 8. The Denali Highway .................................. 43 9. The Dalton Highway .................................. 49 10. Further Readings .................................... 54 11. List of Terms ....................................... 56 Page iii Featured Roads Featured Roads ! Utqiaġvik (Barrow) Other Roads Alaska Marine Highway System Deadhorse! 0 200 Miles Dalton Highway Ü Wiseman! U n C i t a e n d a d S a t a t Kougarok Road e s Teller Road Council Road (! Nome! Fairbanks Delta Junction! Tok! Cantwell(! Alaska Highway Denali Highway Richardson Highway Whitehorse!( ! Anchorage! Valdez Seward Highway Seward! !Juneau Williamsport-Pile Bay Rd Southeast Region ! (! Kodiak Ketchikan Aleutian Islands Kodiak ! (! Unalaska Introduction 1. Introduction Driving along many of Alaska’s highways, it would be easy to see them as just the same as any other highway elsewhere in the United States. They are, today, paved corridors stretching for miles across the land, passing through large cities and small towns, carrying travelers from near and far. Yet for most of their existence, Alaska’s highways and roads were very different, and some of them remain so to the present. Their histories are diverse, growing out of the activities of thousands of Alaska Natives, pioneers, prospectors, soldiers, and engineers who blazed, dug, and paved the routes. They reflect the history of Alaska, from its time as a new territory on the The first edition of The Milepost, published in 1949. edge of the existing frontier, through the booms of gold rushes, to the growth under the threat Morris Communications of World and Cold wars and the establishment of statehood. Many of Alaska’s first roads were built to access the territory’s resources. The lure of gold and other minerals, along with resources such as fish and timber, brought many of Alaska’s early American arrivals. But these men and women found it difficult to get around, and most transportation, even to burgeoning gold mines, was by water. In order to make it easier, and cheaper, for prospectors, miners, and others to access these resources, the federal and territorial governments began building trails across Alaska. This trail network became extensive, reaching parts of the territory that had limited connections before, especially to the ports that connected Alaska to the rest of the country. These trails and roads often had numbers, but it was usually easier to identify them by their destination, or after a prominent figure or engineer who led to their construction. Even today, most Alaskans refer to highways by name (the Richardson, the Seward, the Alaska Highway, etc.), and several different highways may make up one numbered 1 highway route. 1 Several Alaska highways are also part of the Interstate Highway System, numbered A-1 to A-4, although they are not signed. Again, several different highways may make up one numbered Interstate Highway route. Historic Roads of Alaska Page 1 Introduction In time, the government agencies developed road building programs, laying the foundation for many of Alaska’s historic roads and connecting Alaska’s far-flung communities, helping to tie the growing territory closer together. Without these roads, it is hard to envision Alaska’s economy developing as quickly and extensively as it did, especially in the middle of the 20th century, when new military spending combined with the discovery of oil resources to lift Alaska’s economy to new levels. This booklet looks at the history of some of these roads – the Richardson Highway, selected roads around Nome, the roads in the Southeast, the Williamsport-Pile Bay Road, the Alaska Highway, the Seward Highway, the Denali Highway, and the Dalton Highway – to explore their role in Alaska’s history. These roads are by no means all of the historic roads in Alaska, nor do they tell the whole history of road travel in the state. These roads represent different aspects of the Alaska Road Commission work camp near Copper state: from small connector roads to long highways leading to the rest of the country; from local roads that connect Center on the Valdez- communities to ferries that connect whole regions; and from the first major road to gold regions to the latest major Fairbanks wagon road. road to oil regions. These roads are also spread across Alaska and demonstrate the vastness of Alaska and its diversity Alaska State Library Skinner Foundation Photo Collection in climate, economy, and population. Their individual histories illuminate the many ways that Alaska evolved from ASL-P44-05-029 “Seward’s Folly” to a prosperous state, and together can open a new window on Alaska’s history. Page 2 Historic Roads of Alaska Introduction Alaska’s Historic Road Agencies Before the turn of the 20th century, the federal government paid little attention to the new territory. As historians Claus-M. Naske and Herman Slotnick noted, Alaska’s needs “received little consideration from a far-off government in Washington that neither knew nor cared very much about them.”2 Those needs included roads. Native trails were plentiful, and some wagon roads developed along popular routes or to mining claims, but Alaska’s road network did not expand much from the 5 miles of wagon roads that existed at the time of the Treaty of Cession in 1867, and most of the construction was by the miners and residents themselves. The gold rushes of the 1890s and early years of the 1900s brought thousands of people to the territory, and the need for suitable road transportation became a constant outcry to Washington. In response, Congress created the Board of Road Commissioners for Alaska in Winter view of an Alaska Road Commission building in Fairbanks. Estelle and Philip Garges Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library 1905 (usually called the Alaska Road Commission, or ARC), funded by an “Alaska Fund” made University of Alaska Anchorage UAA-hmc-0381-series2-27-1 up of money collected in the territory from liquor licenses, occupation fees, or trade licenses outside of incorporated towns. The ARC originally was under the War Department, and consisted of three Army officers, one of which served as the president. The first president, Wilds P. Richardson, served for the ARC’s first twelve years, and laid the foundation for its success. The commissioners oversaw small teams of surveyors, engineers, and construction crews in defined regions across the territory. Alaskans could petition the ARC to build roads. Many of the early roads were built to support mining or other economic activity. Later, the ARC provided support to the Alaska Railroad and the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) for maintaining some of the railroads and airfields that made up part of Alaska’s transportation system. An Alaska Road Commission construction crew grading a road with a The ARC faced a monumental task from the start. Alaska’s population was growing as more case tractor. and more people arrived to strike it rich in the gold fields or to make their way in the new James Gordon Steese Papers, Dickenson College, Archives and Special Collections towns serving those fields. Newcomers found few roads or even trails when they arrived, and looked to the ARC to provide those roads. But Alaskan communities were scattered across the expansive territory, from older towns like Juneau in the Southeast, to newer ones like Fairbanks in the Interior and Nome on the west coast, so it simply was not possible for the ARC to build a network of roads across all that land. Even deciding which area to prioritize was difficult, especially given the limited funding theARC had to work with and the geographic and environmental challenges Alaska presented. 2 Claus-M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick, Alaska: A History of the 49th State, 76. Historic Roads of Alaska Historic Roads of Alaska Page 3 Introduction As Alaska grew in the first half of the 20th century, other federal agencies like the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR, the predecessor to the Federal Highway Administration [FHWA]) began to operate more extensively within the Territory. The BPR operated largely within national forests, but worked alongside the ARC and the Territorial Road Commission, a small territorial agency, to successfully develop the road system.